IoT is still a vague buzzword for many people. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Mike Kavis, Vice President & Principal Cloud Architect at Cloud Technology Partners, discussed the business value of IoT that goes far beyond the general public's perception that IoT is all about wearables and home consumer services. He also discussed how IoT is perceived by investors and how venture capitalist access this space. Other topics discussed were barriers to success, what is new, what is old, and what the future may hold. Mike Kavis is Vice President & Principal Cloud Architect at Cloud Technology Partners. He has served in numerous technical roles such as CTO, Chief Architect, and VP positions with over 25 years of experience in software development and architecture. A pioneer in cloud computing, Mike led a team that built the world’s first high speed transaction network in Amazon’s public cloud and won the 2010 AWS Global Startup Challenge. An expert in cloud security, he is the author of “Architecting the Cloud: Design Decisions for Cloud Computing Service Models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS)” from Wiley Publishing.
Log data provides the most granular view into what is happening across your systems, applications, and end users. Logs can show you where the issues are in real-time, and provide a historical trending view over time. Logs give you the whole picture. So you've started to build applications with AngularJS; or, maybe you've done unit testing before but haven't used it with AngularJS; or, maybe it's all new to you, but either way this article should help to orient you to the value of using Karma with Jasmine and offer some tips on displaying functionalities of Angular JS. Let's get started! My app is small it doesn't need any tests, right?
Dale Kim is the Director of Industry Solutions at MapR. His background includes a variety of technical and management roles at information technology companies. While his experience includes work with relational databases, much of his career pertains to non-relational data in the areas of search, content management, and NoSQL, and includes senior roles in technical marketing, sales engineering, and support engineering. Dale holds an MBA from Santa Clara University, and a BA in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently identified four keys areas in which to focus for the next 15 years: Health, Farming, Banking, and Education. Bill himself holds forth on a regular basis about the challenges facing many billions of people in the world, particularly in Africa, as well as the opportunities to save lives and change lives. He does not seem naïve about the enormity of the challenges, and does not offer technology as a simple panacea to what ails the world. He also seems committed to respecting national sovereignty in implementing programs, difficult as that may be sometimes. And he seems to understand very clearly that even the vast wealth of his and his wife's foundation and its allies cannot hope to achieve signficant results on its own. I would add Energy, Transportation, and Government to Bill's and Melinda's list–aware that the Foundation supports these areas and many others as well. In our efforts at the Tau Institute, we then focus on how the Internet of Things will play a role in these areas as well as societal improvement and transformation overall. We've also chosen a 25-year timeframe, an thus use the term IoT 2040 to describe our activities. Our program includes research, events, consulting, and technical education. We have four overriding goals: 1. To spur beneficial economic development in all corners of the world 2. To reduce poverty & disease 3. To curtail violence as a way of settling disputes 4. To produce political and societal leaders who will maintain progress We think a good way to measure progress is through the research we've been conducting for the past few years, which creates relative,"pound-for-pound" rankings that show how well nations are doing with respect to their available resources. Our rankings reflect a lot of time spent, by me and by our associates and advisors, living in the various corners of the world. We integrate several technology and social factors into our algorithms -- on the one hand including average bandwidth, access to broadband, number of dataservers, on the other hand including income disparity, perception of corruption, human development, and the local cost of living. The most dynamic countries should correlate well over time with those most quickly growing their economies in an equitable way.
"We are the top stocking distributor for HP renew products in North America. We can only sell to U.S. authorized partners and resellers for HP," explained Miguel Diazdelcastillo Jr., Sales Executive at Creative Business Solutions, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
This year I’m planning to run a one day workshop at a couple of software development conferences and privately for IT shops. The goal is to introduce JavaScript and related technologies to developers that are accustomed to developing in classical object-oriented languages like Java, C++ or C#. Below is the outline of this workshop.
Small data management solutions don’t work in our brave new Big Data world. Back in the small data days, we talked proudly about having gigabytes of structured data that had been carefully denormalized to reduce latency as much as possible. Today’s data is measured in petabytes, and it is dynamic, complex, and wildly varied in structure. Small data was a nicely planned garden, but Big Data is a jungle: rich with resources, abundant in growth, but also a bit overwhelming and easy to get lost in.
Building low-cost wearable devices can enhance the quality of our lives. In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Sai Yamanoor, Embedded Software Engineer at Altschool, provided an example of putting together a small keychain within a $50 budget that educates the user about the air quality in their surroundings. He also provided examples such as building a wearable device that provides transit or recreational information. He then reviewed the resources available to build wearable devices at home including open source hardware, the raw materials required and the options available to power such wearable devices.
We certainly live in interesting technological times. And no more interesting than the current competing IoT standards for connectivity. Various standards bodies, approaches, and ecosystems are vying for mindshare and positioning for a competitive edge. It is clear that when the dust settles, we will have new protocols, evolved protocols, that will change the way we interact with devices and infrastructure. We will also have evolved web protocols, like HTTP/2, that will be changing the very core of our infrastructures. At the same time, we have old approaches made new again like micro-services and reactive programming. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Todd Montgomery, Chief Architect at KAAZING, discussed this changing landscape and explored the various tradeoffs designers face today.
“DevOps is really about the business. The business is under pressure today, competitively in the marketplace to respond to the expectations of the customer. The business is driving IT and the problem is that IT isn't responding fast enough," explained Mark Levy, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Serena Software, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
“The year of the cloud – we have no idea when it's really happening but we think it's happening now. For those technology providers like Zentera that are helping enterprises move to the cloud - it's been fun to watch," noted Mike Loftus, VP Product Management and Marketing at Zentera Systems, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
The consumption economy is here and so are cloud applications and solutions that offer more than subscription and flat fee models and at the same time are available on a pure consumption model, which not only reduces IT spend but also lowers infrastructure costs, and offers ease of use and availability. In their session at 15th Cloud Expo, Ermanno Bonifazi, CEO & Founder of Solgenia, and Ian Khan, Global Strategic Positioning & Brand Manager at Solgenia, discussed this shifting dynamic with an example of a top European Telco provider. Find out how they are leveraging the power of acloud-based consumption model services to offer more value to the mass market and enable a new revenue model that embraces the true meaning of the Third Industrial Revolution.
Gordon Haff wrote an insightful column today about “skeuomorphic virtualizaton,” in other words the notion of thinking of virtual servers as having the same look and feel of the physical machines lying underneath. The upshot is that virtualization ends up just being a form of partioning; users view virtualized instances as no different from a single physical server. Gordon urges the end of skeuomorphism's reign of terror (my words, not his) now that containers are (back) in the news. So don't simply stuff “a hodepodge,” as Gordon says, of operating systems versions along with your app and all that goes with it (web server, database, storage, comms) into a container as if it's just another virtualized machine. Instead, he writes that it's time to think of “containerized operating systems, container packaging systems, container orchestration like Kubernetes, DevOps practices, microservices architectures, “cattle” (shorter term) workloads, software-defined everything, and pervasive open source as part of a new platform for cloud apps.” Reboot Time Old habits die hard. The relentless drive for efficiency in business focuses itself evermore on IT operations, breeding an instinct to view the new tool as simply an improved hammer and to simply try to slam things through with it more quickly. An increasing focus on DevOps, as seen from the high management level, can certainly reinforce this view. But that would be wrong. Containers give everyone another shot at imagining their software as a number of services rather than a unified application. Further, as Gordon notes, they let you throw in an OS here, some orchestration there, a VPN there, and truly become efficient (and more future-proof) in the way you design and deploy what you're trying to do. The original SOA days seem far away to me, but the idea of provisioning services is still a radical one. Too often today, software-as-a-service in the cloud still means software-as-an-application from the sky. The inexorability of Moore's Law allows people to slam things through for short-term gain rather than long-term efficiency, and this will be particularly true as containers become prized for their relative abstemious use of resources. But an expeditious, rather than more profound, use of containers will just create tomorrow's hodgepodge. The potential of containers to reboot the way we think of services and how they should be delivered can logically lead to re-imagining how users should experience what the services offer – and how skeuomorphic those experiences should be, of course.
"Appcore has been around since January 2008. We exclusively built clouds for service providers. We've been working with CloudStack since about that same time and our software sits on top of CloudStack," stated Jeff Tegethoff, CEO of Appcore, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 15th Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
“DevOps is really about the business. The business is under pressure today, competitively in the marketplace to respond to the expectations of the customer. The business is driving IT and the problem is that IT isn't responding fast enough," explained Mark Levy, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Serena Software, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Enterprises are adopting mobile technologies at an unprecedented rate. As Business News Daily recently reported, 1.3 billion workers will go mobile by 2015, and with that massive number, the need for enterprise mobile apps can only skyrocket. With that increase, many mobile app developers will be called upon to create internal mobile enterprise apps. These apps have many requirements and considerations that differ from the typical app destined for the public app stores. In this article, we will take the top three challenges and share some tips on how to meet these challenges:
Today’s enterprise is being driven by disruptive competitive and human capital requirements to provide enterprise application access through not only desktops, but also mobile devices. To retrofit existing programs across all these devices using traditional programming methods is very costly and time consuming – often prohibitively so. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Jesse Shiah, CEO, President, and Co-Founder of AgilePoint Inc., discussed how you can create applications that run on all mobile devices as well as laptops and desktops using a visual drag-and-drop application – and eForms-building techniques in 10% of the time it would take for traditional programming. Connect to all your existing in-house systems and databases as well as third-party applications like Salesforce, SAP, Office 365, etc., through easy-to-create and maintain process-centric enterprise workflow applications your team can create in days.
"Blue Box has been around for 10-11 years, and last year we launched Blue Box Cloud. We like the term 'Private Cloud as a Service' because we think that embodies what we are launching as a product - it's a managed hosted private cloud," explained Giles Frith, Vice President of Customer Operations at Blue Box, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
"SOASTA built the concept of cloud testing in 2008. It's grown from rather meager beginnings to where now we are provisioning hundreds of thousands of servers on a daily basis on behalf of customers around the world to test their applications," explained Tom Lounibos, CEO of SOASTA, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Our last post defined customer lifetime value (CLV) as the metric critical in measuring the success or failure of a recurring revenue program. In order for your company to routinely return significant revenue, maximizing CLV needs to be at the top of your priority list. A CLV-supported strategy boosts many aspects of your business, from sales to customer service. When it comes to increasing customer retention and customer satisfaction, the two keys to driving long-term results, this same strategy works to increase both at every available opportunity.
“The age of the Internet of Things is upon us,” stated Thomas Svensson, senior vice-president and general manager EMEA, ThingWorx, “and working with forward-thinking companies, such as Elisa, enables us to deploy our leading technology so that customers can profit from complete, end-to-end solutions.” ThingWorx, a PTC® (Nasdaq: PTC) business and Internet of Things (IoT) platform provider, announced on Monday that Elisa, Finnish provider of mobile and fixed broadband subscriptions, will deploy ThingWorx® platform technology to enable a new Elisa IoT service in Finland and Estonia.
Disruptive macro trends in technology are impacting and dramatically changing the "art of the possible" relative to supply chain management practices through the innovative use of IoT, cloud, machine learning and Big Data to enable connected ecosystems of engagement. Enterprise informatics can now move beyond point solutions that merely monitor the past and implement integrated enterprise fabrics that enable end-to-end supply chain visibility to improve customer service delivery and optimize supplier management. Learn about enterprise architecture strategies for designing connected systems that integrate physical and digital supply chains with your enterprise systems, leveraging IoT devices, hybrid cloud and network service providers to enable innovative business models while mitigating risk, managing security and increasing capacity to meet customer changing SLA requirements.
The speed of product development has increased massively in the past 10 years. At the same time our formal secure development and SDL methodologies have fallen behind. This forces product developers to choose between rapid release times and security. In his session at DevOps Summit, Michael Murray, Director of Cyber Security Consulting and Assessment at GE Healthcare, examined the problems and presented some solutions for moving security into the DevOps lifecycle to ensure that we get fast AND secure.
“We are a managed services company. We have taken the key aspects of the cloud and the purposed data center and merged the two together and launched the Purposed Cloud about 18–24 months ago," explained Chetan Patwardhan, CEO of Stratogent, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 15th Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
“We are strong believers in the DevOps movement and our staff has been doing DevOps for large enterprise environments for a number of years. The solution that we build is intended to allow DevOps teams to do security at the speed of DevOps," explained Justin Lundy, Founder & CTO of Evident.io, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.